“I Am Not a Persian Carpet”: Diasporic Consciousness in “Tales Left Untold” by Aphrodite D sir e Navab

In “Tales Left Untold,” Aphrodite Désirée Navab employs a poetics that critiques the ways in which immigrants from the so-called Third-World countries are imagined in America as a part of racial and language order in order to provide readers with a lens to focus on the concept of hybridity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of “minor literature” and “becoming-nomad,” this paper aims at exploring how a diasporic body expresses resistance to the capital. Having been deprived of an ontological ground, the poem’s speaker oxymoronically gives voice to the silenced by telling the untold tales. Here, the focus is on how the speaker creates a moment of displacement in the dominant language to highlight the progressing attempts employed by the nomadic body, which demolishes the conventional perception of belonging to a fixed, immobile identity. Finally, this paper reveals how the resisting speaker lays the foundation for a people to come.

Keywords:

Deleuze , deterritorialization , identity , minor literature , smooth space , “Tales Left Untold”